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Nobody can agree on every sound uttered by the former Iraqi dictator in those final chaotic moments before he was hanged on the morning of Dec. 30, 2006, in Baghdad.

There were Shiite taunts from jailers, Sunni defiance from Saddam. However the exact sequence unfolded — a leaked cellphone video told part, not all, of the story — it was a scene that screamed ugly sectarian score-settling, not justice.

But there is no disputing Saddam’s utter contempt for his political successors, including the man who ultimately signed his death warrant, the same man who leads Iraq to this day: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

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“Our state and regime was a real one,” Saddam snapped toward the end of his trial proceedings in October 2006, when he faced charges of genocide relating to the slaughter of 182,000 Kurdish civilians during the 1988 Anfal campaign.

“What is not a real state is one in which people’s heads are being chopped off and dumped in the streets every day,” said Saddam.

The former Iraqi leader was referring to spiralling sectarian violence, which by then had overtaken the anti-American insurgency in both intensity and death counts. It would soon devolve into de facto civil war, with scores of torture victims discovered daily, apparent victims of Shiite and Sunni death squads.

Al-Maliki, even before the trial was over, shrugged away Saddam’s fury, announcing the outcome was preordained — much to the chagrin of human rights observers, who saw a crucial opportunity for Iraqi reconciliation squandered on the altar of sectarian retribution.

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Iraqis in Tuz Khurmato mourn relatives killed by ISIL militants, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is despatched for Middle East talks. Sarah Toms reports.(Reuters)

“An execution order on this criminal despot and his criminal aides will be passed soon,” said al-Maliki. “His execution will remove the playing card on which those who want to be back in power are betting.”

Al-Maliki has had eight years to sort his hand. The cards are even worse now. And, in the face of Obama’s modest moves toward re-entry Thursday, most Americans seem determined to let the game play out without them.

If the maxim of armed intervention remains “you break it, you own it,” the war-scarred American corollary emerging now is: “Yes. And we already paid for it. Several times over.”

And so, even as they brace for the possibility of “discreet and targeted airstrikes” against jihadi militants, as forewarned Thursday by the White House, a rising chorus of American foreign affairs specialists are pushing for the more drastic strategy of breakup: let Iraq go its three separate ways, and let the pieces of the new Middle East emerge as they will.

It’s an old concept — as old as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the colonial grease pencil redrawing of the Middle East map by French and British officials in 1916 and exposed a year later, to deep Arab dismay.

This reporter first heard fears of breakup spoken aloud in Baghdad — whispered, actually — in 2002, in the year before Saddam was toppled. Back then, the walls had ears as part of the Baathist surveillance state. But a handful of Iraqi political analysts were willing to sit behind closed doors with foreign journalists and quietly share their worst fears about what might become of Iraq if ever it were to be unshackled.

The notion of Iraqi disintegration was embraced anew by many in Washington during the worst cycles of violence in 2007 and 2008 as the virtuous undoing of a historic wrong. Sykes-Picot was always an artificial construct, the thinking went. Why spend effort to sustain it?

And now, as Iraq careers again to the sectarian brink, breakup is rapidly re-entering policy vogue, with analysts revising and refining their arguments for why the U.S. should expend no effort to fix the “unfixable.”

“I’ve believed for a while that no glue could possible hold this place together,” The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg wrote Thursday on the heels of Obama’s decision to send up to 300 U.S. military advisers to Iraq.

Noting that breakup would enable self-determination for at least a portion of Kurds, easing a century of injustice to “the world’s largest stateless people,” Goldberg argued that U.S. interests must align instead against “the creation of permanent jihadist safe havens” rather than a unitary Iraqi state.

“Westphalian obsessiveness — Iraq must stay together because it must stay together — just doesn’t seem wise,” wrote Goldberg.

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